Next gen APU : Carrizo featuring Excavator cores and DDR4 memory

AMD officially announced that there won’t be any major changes in the FX desktop CPU lineup until 2015 and since they are more inclined towards the APU sector they are planning to dash out the next gen APU codenamed Cariizo based on totally different Core architecture called Excavator contrary to the Kaveri APU steamroller cores it’s going to succeed. Here we bring to you the complete detailed report on the Carrizo

Introducing the futuristic APU

apu roadmap

The Carrizo is expected to be quite innovative since the implementation of an all new CPU core architecture and, new instruction setsinclusion like AVX2, BMI2, etc along with the Haswell CPUs exclusive, the TSX would be included as well. But the most remarkable factor that simply puts Carrizo in a different league is the DDR4 memory support along with the mainstream DDR3 support as well.

BSN leaked that the AMD APU developers are planning to develop a new CPU architecture in the Family 15h models, 60h-6Fh and some information about the Family is known to be codenamedCarrizo APU, which would feature a new CPU architecture, new GPU and memory controller and FCH Southbridge specifications.

Therefore we bring to you the details of the four major upgrades that Carrizo would have:-

New CPU core architecture

New Integrated GPU

Addition of Instruction sets

Support for DDR4 memory

Core Architecture upgrades and Instruction sets added

kaveri architecture diagram

One of the upgrades Carrizo would have over Kaveri is that the Carrizo would be based on Excavator cores contrary to the Steamroller cores on the Kaveri. The inclusion of new instruction sets like AVX2, BMI2, MOVBE and RDRAND along with few specific variants supporting the Intel’s Haswell instruction set the TSX sets them (Carrizo and Kaveri) apart as well. The new core architecture would improve the IPC and optimization of the cores, but other than that we aren’t aware of any other improvements of Excavator over Steamroller. The main CPU core implementation still based on Bulldozer and the Excavator would mark the Fourth Generation of the Bulldozer core setup. And compared to the previous generations, like the Piledriver and Steamroller, the IPC has improved greatly and this core architecture would be better optimized compared to previous one too. AMD CPUs lag behind Intel CPUs in the IPC comparison since a long time and this would bridge the gap between them.

Integrated GPU upgrade

Unlike the Kaveri APUs, Carrizo’s iGPU won’t be based on the exact GCN setup like the Kaveri iGPU. This time the Codename is Volcanic Islands, this integrated GPU would be a slightly tweaked GCN chip that would feature the same 512 stream processors like its predecessor, this may be because the Carrizo would be based on the same 28nm fabrication tech and this won’t allow the addition of more shading and parallel processing units. This may be an issue since Intel continues to die shrinking its CPUs and make them more and more efficient.

DDR4 support (yet to be confirmed)

The officials say that the Carrizo won’t have DDR4 support while the leaked report by BSN states that it would have DDR3 and DDR4 support. So this is an uncertain upgrade that may or may not be featured. Since even DIMM giants are not able to declare the exact memory specs of the DDR4 (except that it would have a maximum frequency of 2400 MHz) modules therefore this may be a prompt at the authenticity of the official declaration. Intel official declared that Haswell-E CPUs based on LGA 2011-3 X99 platform would support DDR4 memory modules but the controller handles frequencies only up to DDR4-2133. As far as FCH Southbridge and scalability is concerned, the leaked document states that the supported chipsets would sport two SATA III 6GB/s ports, four USB 3.0 ports, eight USB 2.0 ports and in future may add in two UART4, a 12C interface and SD card support. Which is the part of the FP4 package supporting 1866 MHz memory frequency and obviously would be a BGA package type for OEMs. In addition, there’s also a SP2 package and it supports double the channels on a single SDIMM 2133 MHz module and the SP2 also supports RDIMM, LPDIMM and registered DIMM memory types. The Desktop variants of the Carrizo would continue to use the FM2+ socket but the Integrated FCH would be disabled to favor the external FCH use and would guarantee that there’s no need to upgrade the motherboard architecture since Carrizo would support same DDR3 memory controller (officially DDR4 stays in the dark) and just a BIOS upgrade would make the existing FM2+ boards ready to handle Carrizo.

A very potent APU and a useful upgrade

Along with the upgrades mentioned above, Carrizo’s PCI-E expansion has also been upgraded to use all the PCI-E 3.0 slots rather than a single PCI-E 3.0 and rest PCI-E 2.0. One more rumor regarding the PCI-E lanes lingering is that it may only be able to handle 16 lanes rather than 24, 8 reserved for GPU that can be split into x4/x4 and four lanes for general purpose processing, and rest 4 is used in removable media slots. The desktop version can also set aside four channels for connection to the FCH UMI bus, this isn’t mandatory in the BGA version since they are connected through an internal bus. Carrizo’s server edition codenamed“Toronto” is said to support RAS function (which is one of the functions of the ECC memory). The above stated facts are rumors and BSN is our source to provide the above, since the product is scheduled to launch at 2015 therefore there might be certain changes in the course of time.

What do you think about the rumors about the “next Gen” APU? Tell us in the comment section below.